1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video audio reproducing apparatus for recording video and audio signals, and automatically generating metadata for assisting the user in determining the scene to be reproduced at the time of playback or the scene to be edited at the time of editing.
2. Description of the Related Art
With a conventional video recording/playback apparatus, it is not possible to know, in advance, the scenes or the contents in the video which the user is going to view, and it was therefore necessary for the user to find the scene by actually playing back the video or by fast forward, or the like.
To solve the problem, a known video audio playback apparatus uses an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) to display, in advance, the title or the contents of the video program on which the user is to make a decision on whether to view it or not, to enable the user to choose the program to be viewed. Moreover, a technology has been proposed by which the scenes in the programs to be played back are displayed as representative images. For instance, it has been proposed to generate, during video recording, thumbnail images by detecting the encoding parameters in the stream which is to be recorded (see for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-177804 (page 3, FIG. 3)). Furthermore, it has been proposed to automatically detect the scene changes in the digital broadcast program, and identify the index positions (see for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2000-224522 (pages 3 to 4, FIGS. 1 and 2)). Furthermore, it has been proposed to automatically detect the scene change points by extracting the coded stream, during video recording (see for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-49516 (page 7, FIG. 1)).
With a conventional video recording/playback apparatus, it was not possible to generate metadata showing the features of the AV stream, such as thumbnail images, in parallel with the recording processing, if a CPU of a low processing performance is used.